mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 27: Major Overhauls to Broken Stories

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/07/11/writing-excuses-4-27-major-overhauls-to-broken-stories/

Key Points: If you are a new writer, just keep writing! Writing group, editor, agent, your own judgment will usually tell you when a book needs work. Identifying that something is wrong and learning writing triage to pick the right thing to fix take lots of practice. Some possible solutions: rearranging things, adding characters or scenes, removing characters or scenes, changing the setting... You can't do everything in one draft -- focus on fixing certain things.
Leave some breadcrumbs... )
[Brandon] Okay, before this goes any further, I'm going to end it and give you your writing prompt. Writing prompt this week is to take a story that you have written before and take one throwaway comment or throwaway concept somewhere in that story... find something that you didn't mean to be important at all. I want you to instead read write that scene, rewrite that chapter, so that that idea becomes the major focus of it, and see what happens.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 29: How Not to End Your Book

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/04/26/we-talk-about-how-not-to-end-books-with-the-goal-of-helping-you-fix-them/

Key points: good endings go beyond the reader expects. You need to fulfill promises that you made in the first part of the book. Get help identifying promises that you have made. Avoid the third act Hollywood wimpout -- big action set pieces are not automatically good endings. A book in a series should fulfill its promises while opening up new problems for the future. Make your plots fit your books first. Bad endings usually mean bad foreshadowing. Revise to fit.
the meat )
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Writing prompt?
[Dan] Write an ending in which everybody dies and it works.
[Brandon] Start your book with an ending where everyone dies. This has been Writing Excuses. Thanks for listening.
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Six: Endings

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/11/16/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-6-endings/

Key points: endings should be satisfying -- fulfill your promises. Fulfill the expectations of the story, break the expectations of the formula. Gather up all the little plot ribbons and tie them in a bow. "I always do have my ending in mind when I start, but I don't always end up with the ending that I started with."
Yackity-yack )
[Dan] we need a writing prompt. Here's a writing prompt. Take whatever you're working on right now, look at that ending that you've got planned, then think of two other potential endings for that same thing.
[Brandon] and then write all three of them.

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